Visual Studio IDE

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Many companies have heavily invested in WinForms since the introduction of .NET, and as a mature and stable platform, both developers and 3rd party control vendors are continuing to produce WinForms solutions despite the availability of WPF.

With this in mind, it's regretful that Microsoft have prematurely cut support levels to such shockingly low levels that almost no WinForms issues are being addressed on Connect. This includes breakage introduced in .NET 4 / VS2010 and the lack of resources to address those issues. Almost *every single* issue is being closed with the same automated cut and paste response about limited resources, which is resulting in a completely unacceptable level of support.

Please restore at least some additional resources to the WinForms team so they can provide decent levels of support and fix bugs that are causing a great deal of aggravation.

Please don't take this as an attack on WPF by the way. WPF is fantastic for what it's aimed at, but it's just not currently suitable for every type of project and everyone's cup of tea.

Unless Microsoft release an official statement to the contrary, I, along with many other developers will continue to regard WinForms as a viable alternative technology to WPF in a similar way to the debate between ASP.NET WebForms vs. MVC.

In summary, please don't just ditch your large and active WinForms developer base, leaving us in the lurch.

Many companies have heavily invested in WinForms since the introduction of .NET, and as a mature and stable platform, both developers and 3rd party control vendors are continuing to produce WinForms solutions despite the availability of WPF.

With this in mind, it's regretful that Microsoft have prematurely cut support levels to such shockingly low levels that almost no WinForms issues are being addressed on Connect. This includes breakage introduced in .NET 4 / VS2010 and the lack of resources to address those issues. Almost *every single* issue is being closed with the same automated cut and paste response about limited…

We will certianly continue to maintain the product. Today we released Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop which demonstrates our continued support for Windows Forms. Please continue to report bugs on Connect (http://connect.microsoft.com/visualstudio). Individual issues are evaluated carefully – we consider many aspects of the change including the cost, implications, and number of requests.We are closing this issue so you can have your votes back. Thanks for your feedback!

When the Windows Forms Designer, AutoToolboxPopulate = True for solutions with multiple projects having many user controls, reports and datasets causes huge performance degradation when the toolbox is first opened.